Drive Coach Training

[Adam Freeman]

This is not a comprehensive list of things a coach should do, but more a couple of the more important skills.

Pre-competition:
- If you have inexperienced drivers, then you will need to practice with them. A lot. This requires a significant time commitment to get to know them, the game, and your robot. Work with your drivers to learn how you want them to execute.

- Learn what type of motivation your drive team needs. Do they need to be motivated or calmed down? Match how you coach to what they need.


Strategy:
- Understand the game. The best coaches really know the game and the best strategies. This mostly comes from seeing lots and lots of matches. See what teams of similar ability are doing and what is winning matches for them.

- Be honest. Know your teams strengths and weaknesses. Don't give inaccurate information about your team (ie; offensive or defensive abilities). Have scouting data available to backup your claims. If your team is limited, work with your partners to develop a strategy to put your alliance in the best position to win.

- Know your partners strengths and weaknesses. Examine the scouting data on your partners so you can develop a winning strategy.


During a match
- Know the clock. The first couple matches will seem to be over before they start. 2:00 minutes goes pretty fast at first. Get used to the time it takes to complete typical game tasks. Eventually this will become second nature.

- Communicate clearly with your drive team. Execute what you agreed to do.

- Work as an alliance. Communicate clearly with the other coaches. Let them know if you need help or if something is not going to plan. Make sure they know if you aren't going to be able to do what was agreed upon.


It seems everyone has a different style of coaching...and most of them can be successful. There is no...one perfect coaching style....well outside of mine.

Good Luck. To me, its the most enjoyable experience in FIRST.

[penguinfrk]

A note to take everything mentioned here with a grain of salt. Who knows what GDC might throw at us as far as human players go? Last year, good analysts took the role of coordinating things among the three alliance partners, so the coaches were able to focus more on their robot alone (of course, when there wasn't a good analyst, some coaches still took initiative and worked out alliance strategies etc.).

From experience, I've found that sometimes a student coach might work better than an adult coach, even if they had no prior experience behind the plexiglass. If there is a team member that your drivers are particularly comfortable with, don't hesitate to let them try coaching simply because they've never done it before. If nothing else, at least on a psychological level, the entire drive team will be more calmed and ready for matches.

As mentioned in Dale's thread, you can get pretty good practice watching match videos. If you're not attending a Week 1 event, watch streams and/or recordings of Week 1 events, especially the elimination matches (or any matches with teams that consistently perform well) and put it on mute, and just have the prospective coaches keep up a commentary of what's going on strategically.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by penguinfrk

From experience, I've found that sometimes a student coach might work better than an adult coach, even if they had no prior experience behind the plexiglass. If there is a team member that your drivers are particularly comfortable with, don't hesitate to let them try coaching simply because they've never done it before. If nothing else, at least on a psychological level, the entire drive team will be more calmed and ready for matches.

(emphasis mine) I'd revise this slightly. The team member--student or adult, experienced or not--whom the drivers are most calm and prepared with during the match may well be your best coach. This is because calm drivers is one of your biggest assets overall, and isn't necessarily even related to who the drivers work well with in other situations. No matter how comfortable you are together, if the drivers don't trust your coaching judgement they'll never feel totally calm or prepared for matches. I've been in this situation as a student driver.

Let your drive team help pick and train each other. Drivers often understand intuitively (of figure out right quick) what they want in a coach, and can be good at finding and/or communicating it.


A lot of people have done a great job with advice. I don't have much to add except to remember your job can be viewed as ensuring your drivers do their job as well as possible. That covers everything from to practicing productively together*, ensuring they have an optimized control scheme, preparing the alliance before each match, keeping them calm and motivated in-game, staying adaptable and communicative as the match plays out, and protecting them afterwards. Ask your drivers and even your alliance for constructive feedback on your performance.

*I would recommend practicing with as match-like conditions as you can manage at least of the sometime. Watching matches (live if at all possible) and discussing strategic options is also helpful. Attending and watching other events on your off-weekends is great.

[MaxMax161]

A ton of great advice has been mentioned above, but I think this point has been very undervalued.

- Train your drivers

In my humble opinion, training so that your drivers drive the robot as perfectly as it can be driven is the most valuable thing a coach can do. This is not easy and requires knowing exactly what to say to each driver and what drills to run. In my experience these skills come from knowing your drivers and the robot inside out and backwards.

Knowing your drivers and robot this well will also help you on the field. You will know exactly what your robot can and can't do, how it can fit in with the alliance, and most importantly what you want to happen can most quickly be communicated to the drivers and they can do it.

I don't mean to undermine any of the above advice by not repeating it; I just don't want to be redundant. Good luck and if there's any other way I can help feel free to ask.

[GiannaLeigh3]

There really isn't one particular style that works best. Finding the right strategy for your team is necessary, and not universal for all teams. Some teams like having a drive coach tell them lots of information but, ours didn't. We would get stressed and overloaded if he told us what other teams were doing or if he gave us a lot of information all at once. I suggest trying out different methods of communication or hand signals, and talking with your drive team once they get selected about what they like and dislike. A good drive coach/driver relationship is based on equal trust, respect and good open communication.

[Kyle Love]

Pre-match planning is my number one priority. Be sure to get drivers and other teams that you are with that match on the same page. Have a general plan and flow pattern set up before you step up to the sticks.

Practice before the competition is a big thing, also. The more hands on practice you can squeeze in the better. As a high school driver, I found that the operator, coach and I had a fairly calm, semi-silent way of doing things. We developed an intuition with each other so that we could think like each other and know what we should do. This also happens when you create a "play book" of sorts. Have common general goals from match to match.

I agree with what Adam said about being a time keeper and motivator. No matter how stacked the odds are against you, as soon as the match starts, it's a level playing field, things happen, robots may not move etc. NEVER go into a match with a negative attitude. Any match can be won by any alliance on any day. Sometimes the drivers don't look at the game clock, I would suggest developing a system where you tell them common times (1 minute, 30 sec, 15 sec and then count down from 5). Even though there may be field sounds to tell you such info, sometimes the drivers don't hear them.

Just remember to stay calm, "loud talking" may be needed at times, stay positive, and never place blame for an outcome on one person, this is a team effort.